

The Heart of the Rain Tree by Geraldine Choo Tales from the Lonely Tree by Vanessa Ni Qiu Rui Be entertained by a motley gang of characters both strange and the deranged, uber-rational and supernatural, feathered or plucked in The Ayam Curtain. The reader steps into a technological dystopia one moment and wakes up a crow in the next story, all within the space of a hundred words.Įxpect a spirit war in underground tunnels, genetically-modified babies and a Singapore overrun by anti-government spies in these short stories.


Kong jiao wei, in Hokkien, means “speaking bird language.” It is a cock-and-bull story, a flight of fancy and, incidentally, the perfect phrase to describe this collection of microfiction with a quintessentially Singaporean flavour.
